There's a concept I believe in which has to do with giving words power. If you react negatively to a word or show recoil, the word is given more power. You can defeat things in three ways with this ideology:

1. Grow a tough skin, but this doesn't solve the problem of the power the word can have

2. Seek for protection or ban against the word, this could work if everyone is on board, but how likely is that? And in doing this you give the power the word has more legitimacy

3. Don't apply any significance to the word, it weakens the word, you don't need to have a tough skin or seek protection against words that have no more power

This happened with me and the word "Paki", within my circle it was seen as a derogatory word against Pakistani people, which to me was always ironic since Pak means clean, so a Paki would be a clean person. I told my friends that there's nothing wrong with using the word Paki and they are free to use it, and I used it myself. This was the mindset of a lot of Paki people in fact, and you don't really see it as a "bad" word. It lost its power as a discriminatory word.